COMMUNITY | Spectrum Magazine

artists' spotlight

For each issue, Spectrum will select a few works to feature as honorable mentions on our website. These are submissions our team enjoyed, but didn’t make the final cut for the magazine. Each creator has also written a short description about their inspirations: click the envelopes to see their pieces!

I've always wanted to write about how scared I was by that television channel, but I never really wanted to face the fact that something so calming for others kept me up at night. It wasn't until I couldn't sleep a day past the actual deadline for this that I decided to write about it which helped me reflect a lot on how what comforts me can't be decided by someone else. This piece drew from a lot of the traumas of my life as a kid and how hard it was to cope, but acts as an active way of coping in my current life! I truly find a lot of solace in redescribing my past:) - Lizzie Harrison

Lizzie Harrison - Sleeping

Avery Neuner - Impressionism

I wrote this piece about some of my favorite places from my hometown. Specifically, I wrote it when I was at a swimming hole in the redwood forest called The Garden of Eden. That is the inspiration for the second stanza. I go there at least once every summer, and I love swimming in fresh water and the seclusion of it. You're very isolated in nature when you're there, and it feels a little bit like you're having a conversation with the river and the birds and such. The title comes from the idea of impressionism as an art movement. French impressionism specifically is my favorite, and I particularly love the way they capture the world in broad, soft strokes. But they can never really capture the natural word the same way you'd experience it. They add their own artistic flair rather than capturing anything with photographic accuracy, but art never really holds up to the experience of being with the world. - Avery Neuner

Josh Meyers - Sermon of the Child

I had, I guess, two thoughts in mind while writing this piece. Most simply, you might read this poem as a reflection on how it feels to create. Writing creatively – creating in whichever way one chooses – is always rewarding, but comes at the price of often worrying that you will lose whatever quality you possess which facilitates that creation. The threat of the dreaded ‘dry spell’ sometimes inspires us to create feverishly and perhaps incautiously – in those moments, we become very much like children. I also intended readers to wonder why this piece involves a sermon. This poem is born in part from reflecting on certainty and how it shapes belief and reality. Children, least aware of the world and its scope, are often, ironically, the most certain in their view of it. Place the child behind a lectern, from which another famously certain sort of person does his speaking, and the reader is asked to question whether the speaker is yet qualified to deliver a sermon, which, for many reasons, is quite an important thing. -Josh Meyers

This piece was written for a creative writing workshop, aiming to show how two people's differing positionalities shape their view of the same moment. Each paragraph was built to mirror the other, echoing the way the mirror itself becomes how these two women see themselves. The mother was modeled on Evelyn Hugo from the book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, hence the emerald dress and the ritual of getting ready for a show. The poem imagines how a little girl witnessing that ritual might come to see her own beauty. The line "too little to worry about looks" recurring on both sides is the anchor: though meant to protect childhood innocence, it quietly primes a child to understand that looks will matter later. The daughter experiences her mother's beauty’s success through toys and male attention, while the mother sees potential in her daughter's youth. The two characters were given opposite features intentionally, alluding to insecurities that might take root in a girl who watches features unlike her own get rewarded again and again. Together, these choices were meant to explore how female value is taught through resemblance and reflection, an influence from society that comes very early in a girl’s development. -Sabrina Lopez